First Wiltshire Biodigester Opens for Business

Wiltshire’s first anaerobic digestion plant plant operated by Malaby Biogas, has opened for business. The first feed materials have fed into a new biodigester in Wiltshire, UK, after only 12 months of construction and commissioning trails.  The biodigester is Wiltshire’s first large scale biogas plant, which became viable when it's promoter it was able to get £5 million ($7.7 million) in loan funding from Clydesdale Bank and the UK government's own WRAP (Waste and Resource Action Programme), joined in with financial assistance as part of the government’s own £10 million loan fund for biogas and CHP projects.

We have provided a quotation from the full article below. At the end of the extract we have provided a link to the full article, and we suggest that you use that to visit the original web site:

The plant will look to process 17,000 tonnes of food waste a year and produce around 500KW of electricity for the national grid. It will receive bulk feedstock from both commercial and municipal sources, including local businesses like schools, pubs and restaurants.

Minter believes it will take up to six months to get the plant up to full speed based on biology growth and the completion of operational milestones: ‘It is important that we build a stable and robust process to ensure this is one of the best running plants around.’

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Malaby Biogas Gets New UK Anaerobic Digestion Plant with Funds Allocated by WRAP

We are pleased to report that the UK is seeing progress on AD Plant projects, as WRAP funding is allocated to a UK biogas company. The following is quoted from a Bioenergy News magazine article , on 17 January 2012:

"UK-based Malaby Biogas has received a loan from an anaerobic digestion (AD) fund, Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), which will go towards building a new plant.

The facility will be based in Wiltshire, and as Bioenergy Insight reported last month, will be built on a former 12 acre smallholding site.

The £800,000 (€960,000) loan will be used for the construction of the plant, which is costing a total of £5 million.

Malaby plans to use technology provider Marches Biogas for the installation and hopes to start commissioning the project in March.

‘Feedstock for the plant will be non-packaged food waste supplied by a new commercial collection operator with additional material potentially coming from other commercial and industrial food waste providers within the local area,’ says Malaby director Thomas Minter.

‘Initially the plant will process around 17,000 tonnes of waste a year and we’d hope to be able to handle up to 20,000 tonnes at full capacity.’

It is the first loan to be given by the fund and the programme aims to handout more to similar projects.

‘Malaby is the first of what we hope will be a number of companies to benefit from the anaerobic digestion loan fund and it is excellent to see such good progress being made at the Wiltshire plant,’ says WRAP director Steve Creed.

‘We’re currently considering a number of other applications, and the new round of loan awards for 2012 has just begun, so we’d encourage anyone who is interested in the fund to get in touch with us.’"

View the original article here

Somerset council approves biogas extension - BioEnergy News

Somerset council approves biogas extension

17 October 2011

A biogas facility in Somerset, south west England, has been given approval to double its current capacity to power 4,000 homes.

(The follwing video stays on the "Somerset" subject matter of this post, but shows an un-associated AEROBIC composting facility. While this is excellent bio-management, aerobic systems, although cheaper to build and operates, aerobic processing does not produce any biogas or any energy at all, and in fact require substantial energy inputs to operate.)

Currently the Cannington Enterprises plant uses an anaerobic digester to produce power from residue crops such as maize silage, grass, whole crop and big bale silage but it will now be allowed to treat up to 75,000 tonnes of other waste such as rotting food.

A number of residents objected to the original application, made in March, because they believed it would create excess traffic on narrow roads and that the smell would impact tourism in surrounding areas.

The company needs to prepare an odour management plan, a noise management plan and landscape plan before commencing the build. http://anaerobic-digestion.com

As part of the extension, the company plans to extend a tanker loading to an existing building, build a separator facility for the ‘spent digestate accompanied by a solid digestate bay and liquid digestate tank’, and construct a maintenance building and gas holder.

View the original article here

Google backs biogas project - BioEnergy News

Google backs biogas project - 13 September 2011

The waste from 9,000 pigs will be used to produce electricity and cut CO2 emissions

In North Carolina, US, Duke University and electric and gas service provider Duke Energy, have developed a renewable energy project with the help of search engine Google. The project creates electricity from pig excrement.

The biogas plant has been set up at the Yadkinville-based Loyd Ray Farms, which is home to 9,000 pigs.

Duke Energy and the university have invested $1.2 million (€880,000 million) in the project to date, however Google's investment has not been divulged.

Originally proposed almost three years ago, the project also received grants from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources Lagoon Conversion Program.

The plant will slash CO2 emissions by 5,000 tonnes a year – the same as removing 900 cars from the road.

Both Duke Energy and Duke University will cover the costs of operating and maintaining the plant for the first 10 years that it is online. Google will cover a percentage of the university's costs in return for some of the carbon offsets for a five-year period.

View the original article here

Three companies partner for biogas power plant - BioEnergy News

Three companies partner for biogas power plant  - 6 September 2011

Three renewable energy companies have formed a partnership to develop and run a biogas pipe plant in Columbia, South Carolina, US.

The new anaerobic digester will convert 48,000 tonnes of organic waste matter into 3.2MW of biogas power.

German plant engineering company Eisenmann will supply its anaerobic digestion technology to the project, while US companies W2E Organic Power and CIYCOR will oversee construction work.

'We have developed a significant group of partners with waste streams for our system and we look forward to beginning this brand new effort to process waste into energy,' says Daniel Rickenmann, CEO of W2E Organic Power, who is confident the project will be completed ahead of schedule.

The joint venture will break ground on the facility before the end of this year, with operations scheduled to begin in 2012.

View the original article here

Waste to Bioenergy Projects Evaluated by Danish Consortium - Waste Management World

The Maabjerg BioEnergy biogas plant while under construction: 31 August 2011

Danish energy company, DONG Energy is establishing a green energy consortium with local players to determine if a number of bioenergy projects, including waste to energy projects are technically and economically viable.

Over the coming 15 months, the consortium - Mabjerg Energy Concept - will explore project opportunities in the form of new plants and conversion of existing plants.

According to the consortium, all projects will be within the scope of green energy generation based on local biomass and waste resources, which will be used to generate a range of energy products, including biogas, hydrogen, bioethanol and electricity and heat.

The consortium says that it will look specifically at the possibilities of constructing a second-generation bioethanol plant, expanding the existing Maabjerg BioEnergy anaerobic digestion plant by adding a hydrogen generation plant, as well as converting the existing biomass-fired CHP plant to enable it to handle waste products from the bioethanol plant in future.

Additionally, the consortium will study the possibility of constructing a waste treatment plant that will use enzymes to separate waste fractions for use in biogas production.

Besides DONG Energy, the participants in Mabjerg Energy Concept are: Vestforsyning, Struer Forsyning and the waste company Nomi. Jorgen Udby, Vestforsyning's CEO, is the chairman of the consortium.

"The establishment of Mabjerg Energy Concept will boost the opportunities for Danish research and, especially, export of green energy know-how," says Thomas Dalsgaard, senior vice president of DONG Energy.

View the original article here

Weltec develops biogas plant in Latvia - BioEnergy News

Weltec develops biogas plant in Latvia

8 April 2011

Germany-based biogas plant manufacturer Weltec Biopower is developing its second biogas plant in the city of Limbaži, Latvia.

Upon completion the plant will generate 500kW power. The 3,500m3 fermenter will feed in the power from July 2011 and plans for expanding the plant with another fermenter are already underway.

The biogas facility will handle 3,500 tonnes of cattle manure, 1,900 tonnes of cow waste, 500 tonnes of whole plant silage, 300 tonnes of grass silage and 7,000 tonnes of maize silage.

The 88m3 stainless-steel storage tank is heated and the two 250kW gas-powered engines will produce biogas for 8,000 hours a year.

View the original article here

Largest biogas plant opens in the Netherlands - BioEnergy News

Largest biogas plant opens in the Netherlands - 8 February 2011

The 7 February 2011 saw Dutch fish processing company A van de Groep open its biogas plant.




We could not find a video about the plant referred to in this article so we decided to include the video above of another Dutch anaerobic-digestion project.

Located in Spakenburg, the Netherlands, the facility is one of the largest in the nation. It has enough capacity to provide 3,500 households with gas.

At the plant, fish and other food waste is converted into 6 million m3 of renewable energy annually. That is 6% of the total biogas produced in the Netherlands.

View the original article here

Come on Gordon Let's Get on with Bio-Energy Production in 2008

Happy New Year all subscribers! Here's hoping for a great new year for Anaerobic Digestion and biogas projects generally.

Here is a rallying call to all for the start of 2008...

Considering that about 60 % of the total amount of UK animal manure could be handled at biogas plants in future, the potential of primary energy from biogas is a small but significant percentage of the UK renewable energy target.

Using renewable energy from biogas eliminates greenhouse gas production and reduces the use of non-renewable fossil fuel. So why is this target not being pursued more vigorously by the UK government?

Gordon Brown introduced the possibility in the Climate Change Bill of raising the target for cutting carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 (NCE Magazine (eMap) 22 November 2007).

However, a simple calculation tells us that, even if we start now, that implies a steady reduction of 3.7% per year (compounded year on year) for the next 43 years.

This is surely a big burden and even the existing target of reducing by "only" 60% implies a 2.1% reduction per year.

Can the UK really do that? Don’t also forget that the population of the UK is forecast to grow by possibly 30% over the same period.

I am sure that the pundits will say that the national economy will be very likely to suffer.

Will members of the public go along with that? They possibly will, but only if they can see the path forward and that the systems being invested in are truly green.

Of course they will understand this is the case, especially for bioenergy, however, the energy experts and engineers explain to them that some energy-saving technologies can bring them financial benefit if up-front investment is made soon enough.

The experts will also need to explain the reality of ‘peak oil’, how we have never known when this will be upon us and still have very little idea. However, current escalation of oil prices will pale into insignificance once the threshold is upon us. For all we know peak oil might occur next year, or not for 20 years, but peak oil will happen, and when it does they will want the then relatively cheap bioenergy to fill the gap.

Bioenergy (including biogas energy) is only one of the technologies which will succeed if explained in this way. Draught-controlling passive house ventilation is another example where the public save money as well as enhancing the environment.

Now is the chance of our readers, especially those visitors who are active professionals in the bio-energy field to take the lead and achieve that respected high profile long sought by those in the renewables and biogas industries.